I'm stealing this idea from Thing(amabrarian)s That Go Bump in the Night, since it's interesting to hear about what other people are reading, and it's also generated some pretty good conversations.

I just finished The Other by Thomas Tryon, an author I first heard about in Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale. Even though Joshi gives a fairly spoilerific plot summary, it did not ruin the book for me at all. Just an excellent work, a perfect combination of atmosphere, plot, characterization, you name it.

I'm also reading an anthology of Carlos Fuentes featuring several short stories and the novella Aura. There's some pretty powerful stories, some really surreal.

I'm not sure if this counts as weird fiction (and I'm not reading it yet), but I just picked up a book called Whitechapel Gods. (I have to be honest, the cover grabbed my attention and I'm a sucker for a first time author.)

I'm not one to get hung up on the definition of weird fiction. I kind of like it as a broad category. (But that's all been discussed in a different thread.)

That is a very intriguing cover. Let us know how it is.

The Fuentes anthology (Cuentos Sobrenaturales) was pretty good, although it brought up some (possibly pedantic) questions about what distinguishes "magical realism" from "weird fiction." I think most of the stories in the collection could easily fit into either, though I think that most of them have that sense of dread more associated with horror and weird fiction than with work such as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabelle Allende.

Anywway, I'm now reading The New Weird. It's an interesting anthology, though I think it could do a little better job of weaving its thoughts on the movement/sub-genre with the presentation of the stories themselves. Instead it leaves all that material for the last third of the book.

I think that it is the sense of dread or horror that separates 'weird fiction' from 'magical realism'.

If I had to draw the line somewhere, I'd probably draw it there. Although, I'd have to admit the line can be blurry, such as in the titular story of Lucius Shepard's The Jaguar Hunter. (Well, and a couple others in the collection.)

So, I finished The New Weird, which was a pretty good collection. I still think it could have done a better job of presenting what it meant by New Weird and integrating that material into the stories. As is, I mostly got the feeling that the editors that it might be a legitimate label but didn't really want to commit to it.

I'm reading Dracula at the moment. I wish I could have read it without already knowing so much about the book. The plot of the first few chapters consists of Jonathan Harker coming to realise that Dracula, who he is staying with, is weird and dangerous. Well duh. But I'm still enjoying it.

I'm reading another collection in Spanish. This one is called Antologia de la Literatura Fantastica and is available in translation as The Book of Fantasy. It's a nice wide sweep of literature using weird and fantastic elements. There's some of the usual suspects (Dunsany, Poe, etc.) but also some authors I was not familiar with. The most startling surprise so far has been "Ser Polvo" ("Being Dust") by Santiago Dabove, which is about a man who finds himself becoming a plant. It reminds me a lot of Julio Cortazar's "Axolotl."

I'm now reading Whitechapel Gods. I've seen it classified as Steampunk or Science Fiction, but it isn't as focused on the technology as either of those genres normally are.

Peters has created a unique world where the district of Whitechapel has been cut off from the rest of the world. A cancer-like disease (the clacks) is turning people into machines and steel girders seem to grow like trees. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the book so far.

It is a first novel though. I would like to have a bit more description, though I like description more than most. Also there are several threads and characters to follow. I've lost track a couple of times but was able to catch up. For a first time author to try something so out there, I give him a lot of credit.

Message edited by its author, Sep 20, 2008, 8:49pm.

Well, I'm still working my way through Poe's works, and I'm hoping to finish in the next couple of days. It's been a pleasant surprise to discover Poe's (sometimes quite dark) sense of humor, but I have to admit I'd probably recommend one of the smaller collections to the more casual fan of weird fiction as some of his less famous stuff is a little dull.

I also recently finished 20th Century Ghosts, which has some pretty interesting variety. Overall, I thought it was pretty good, although sometimes it seemed Hill set up an interesting idea but then didn't really take it anywhere.

I've just finished Gil's All Fright Diner that was weird in a Christopher Moore (touchstone not working) kind of way.

Would Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere be considered weird? My TBR is growing much faster than I can read, but it looks interesting.

I have Gil's All Fright Diner and In the Company of Ogres on my TBR pile. I saw A Nameless Witch was out in paperback, but haven't picked it up since I haven't yet read those other two.

Have you written a review for Gil's? I'm curious about it, but not sure about the comparison to Christopher Moore. I read Bloodsucking Fiends and Practical Demonkeeping and liked them well enough, but it felt like Moore was trying too hard to be wacky. If Gil's gives off that same vibe...

Message edited by its author, Sep 26, 2008, 11:45pm.

Gil's All Fright Diner was one of my favorites of the year. It's comedy, but for me, not so much like Christopher Moore's comedy. Moore always seems a bit forced to me, like he's trying to be clever rather than funny. Martinez didn't strike me that way.

I can go along with that. Gil's All Fright Diner doesn't go so much for clever as just for comedy. A couple of rednecks who happen to be a vampire and a werewolf driving down the road drinking beer trying to solve a zombie problem in a small town. Throw in some ghosts, black magic, a magic eight ball and pig latin and you have a fun read. I really enjoyed the interaction of the two main characters. He's basically poking fun at the stereotypes of the horror genre.

From what I understand In the Company of Ogres does the same for fantasy and is in my TBR as well. I would give Gil's a try as it is a light and easy read and generally entertaining.

Message edited by its author, Sep 27, 2008, 7:14pm.

I finished this a couple of weeks ago, but I thought I'd give a few final thoughs on The Unabridged Edgar Allen Poe. Reading all of Poe's works was a very interesting experience. I really liked Poe's sense of humor, which could be really twisted. And there's a reason his weird fiction and detective stories have been so influential. But he's not a great stylist, which means sometimes his 19th century writing style was really dull. I compared my reading experience with reading Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne is a contemporary of Poe and his prose can be as unnecessarily ornate, per the time period. But Hawthorne can make a long description of a sunny garden a joy to read, which Poe couldn't really do.

And right now, I'm reading Melmoth the Wanderer, which is more gothic than weird, but I'm really into it. It's perhaps not quite as strong as Wuthering Heights, but it's nearly as captivating. More weird and interesting than The Monk and waaay more atmospheric than The Castle of Otranto.

And from the old weird to the New Weird: I finished Melmoth the Wanderer (which was quite good!) and am now reading The Etched City now. It reminds me of M. John Harrison's Viriconium, though the writing's definitely less baroque.

Not quite weird fiction, but I've been reading Lord of a Visible World which is a collection of excerpts from Lovecraft's letters to various people, organized to create an "autobiography" of sorts. It's a really fascinating look at his life and fiction. It's interesting reading HPL's impressions of places in Florida that I had visited when I was younger.

Just finished re-reading Peter Straub's Ghost Story for the first time since it was published (in 1979 - yikes!). It still holds up very well. Some intriguing ideas about just what a ghost might be, plenty of grue, and a couple of superb scenes of fright (such as Sheriff Hardesty's experience in the makeshift morgue). I 'd also forgotten that it's a wendigo tale! It's easy to spot the heavy influence of Straub's buddy Stephen King at this early point, but it all remains pretty good.

Message edited by its author, Nov 7, 2008, 9:53am.

Carlos, glad to hear that you enjoyed 'The Other'. Thomas Tryon is a hidden treasure. I also strongly recommend Harvest Home.

Speaking of hidden treasures, track down William H. Hallahan's The Search for Joseph Tully, another positively unnerving novel from the 1970's that holds up remarkably well!

Message edited by its author, Nov 7, 2008, 9:59am.

I am new to librarything and therefore, I am new to this group now as a fan of weird movies such as horror, sf and fantasy. I am going dig my eyes into some wierd, yet wonderful and I was wondering if you guys could give me any reccomendations on where I should start.

Pretty much all the books listed in this thread are good choices. If you haven't already, I'd start with some Lovecraft and Clark Aston Smith and some Robert E. Howard to get the foundation of the weird tradition. Then, just dive in to the stuff here!

I agree with Dr. Neutron, and I'd also recommend one of the Weird Tales anthologies which usually will have at least one story from Smith, Lovecraft and Howard as well as by other writers of weird fiction. I can personally vouch for Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors as a solid anthology, and I've heard good things elsewhere on LT about the others, such as Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror or The Best of Weird Tales.

I just finished the Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by
Ginnetta Correli http://www.librarything.com/work/6548479... it was weird, strange and dark.

Just finished a bunch of short stories by Victor Pelevin..absurd/weird.
Currently reading life and death are wearing me out ..pretty strange too.

I am new on this site. Would you be so kind to recommend how to find texts by Pelevin on line. I would love to introduce his books to my French-English speaking husband.

Irina

i checked the Pelevin books I read out from UNC-CHill's library; I didn't look for them online. But..if you have access to them, i'd look for a werewolf problem in central russia - a fantastic (in every sense) collection of short stories.

bob

I just finished The Magic Ring, or The Castle of Montfaucon by Baron de la Motte Fouque, a classic piece of weird fiction or at least a precursor to weird fiction as well as fantasy. It's definitely an Arthur/chivalric tale, taking place in the 12th c. and mentioning the Crusades. It was a very exciting read and I can see why HPL and Poe enjoyed the Baron (as well as many 19th century readers). I'm reading some of his other stories now, which are also exciting and entertaining.

Message edited by its author, Dec 17, 2008, 12:34am.

Chiming in a little late here. I love Christopher Moore (have done about 5 of his books on audio). Just finished The Shuttered Room and other tales of Horror. These were uncompleted Lovecraft stories finished by Auguest Derleth. Overall I'd call it mediocre and wouldn't recommend it. But Carlos maybe interested to hear that the last story in the book "The Dark Brotherhood" has a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe clones (created by aliens) walking around in it.

Also Carlos, I have a couple books of Lovecraft's letters, I've read most of the first one but I didn't realize that he had ever travelled to Florida. It's especially interesting because I live in St. Petersburg now. Where did he talk about visiting?

Currently reading Freak Like Me which is mostly non-fiction but definitely about as weird as it gets (especially because it's real).

Hi folks;
I just joined this group and I look forward to following up on some of the books mentioned above.

I read what jseger9000 says above: "I think that it is the sense of dread or horror that separates 'weird fiction' from 'magical realism'" and was reminded very strongly of some of Tanith Lee's work. Specifically, The Secret Books of Paradys, The Blood Opera Sequence: Dark Dance, Personal Darkness and Darkness, I and The Secret Books of Venus.

Anyway - just my first thoughts on arrival.

Michael

Message edited by its author, Jan 1, 2009, 7:21pm.

Hi, amobogio, welcome to the group.

I've only encountered Tanith Lee in the pages of Weird Tales, where she's consistently got some great stories.

Tanith Lee is actually one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately she has put out some really terrible stuff too. The Flat Earth books are in my top 3 or 4 fantasy books of all time, especially Death's Master (won't load the book). I actually just started reading the first Paradys book 2 days ago. I read the first story a long time ago and thought it sucked so I stopped. But then had a friend say the rest of the book was good.

Finished -Freak Like Me-. It was great. I reviewed it on this stie. Other than that Tanith Lee book I'm also reading Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft which is a bunch of short graphic stories including Hellboy and a beautifully illustrated Clark Ashton Smith story -Mother of Toads-. Also has an interview with a real life witch (wicca) priestess. Pretty good so far.

I recently finished Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft, which was pretty fun. As the intro says, a lot of HPL's stuff lends itself to adaptation. The adaptation of "Herbert West - Reanimator" was pretty good, and really brought out some of the macabre humor. The collection does have it's weak points, which I believe have been fixed for the second edition.

I also just started La muerte y su traje (Death and its suit) by Santiago Dabove, an early 20th Century Argentine author influenced heavily by Poe and Maupassant. Quite interesting.

Message edited by its author, Jan 10, 2009, 3:47am.

I'm not really sure to what extent Bruno Schulz fits into the spectrum of the weird, but since I first learned of him through Thomas Ligotti I think of him as at least weird by association. I'm currently reading his Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, his second and last short book. His short stories are quite captivating re-tellings of his youth through a surreal imagination and talent for language that can be downright intoxicating.

I couldn’t get into Thomas Ligotti, I tried a collection of his short stories Shadow at The Bottom of the world. I guess because while I liked some of the ideas and the atmosphere I couldn’t feel anything for the characters. His short stories may not be the best place to start I guess though. Is there a better place to start?

I don't know how much I can help, because Ligotti is not really much of a character writer. (It's something I'm perfectly fine with, though I realize I might be in the minority.) I think "The Frolic" in the collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer starts off with some sympathetic characters before going someplace weird. Otherwise, his characters tend to be fairly strange.

Making my way through The Secret Books of Paradys I and II from Tanith Lee. It's dark, surreal and pretty weird.

Also just finished The Tomb and other stories from H.P. Lovecraft.

I've suddenly got a fair amount to read as consequence of being in quarantine at home whilst within the contagious phase of Chickenpox!

I'm an absolute sucker for chapbooks and recently polished off the two titles by John Sunseri "A Little Job in Arkham" and "The Innsmouth Affair" published by Rainfall Books (RAIN 040 and 042 respectively). The chapbooks contain the three Milton Trent stories published thus far (unless you know better!). Trent is a thief par excellence who gets drawn into the Cthulhu Mythos through no fault of his own. They're enormous fun, fast-paced thrillers from a relatively unknown author to date.

I've also just finished "Other Dimensions Volume 2" by Clark Ashton Smith, an old Panther paperback from 1970. I'm a great fan of his work and his imagination puts him, for me, in the genius category. This particular collection is patchy with some great sci-fi and strange tales interspersed with some throwaway filler material. There are much better collections than this one, so one for the established fans and collectors alone I feel. An excellent starter voume for Clark Ashton Smith would be "The Emperor of Dreams", within the Gollancz 'Fantasy Masterworks' series'. It's in paperback, affordable and is an absolute treasure house of some of the outstanding and otherwordly strange tales written by a gifted author from the golden age of pulps.

Reading Infected by Scott Sigler. It is bloody good. Available in print and podcast. The latter you can get on scottsigler.com or download from Itunes. Both are free but you will have to pay for the book you cheapo!

Just started Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman, who described his stories as "strange tales." So far, just read the first story, "The Swords" which features a strange carnival sideshow, a decayed England town, and a peculiar sexual encounter.

Also started In The Penny Arcade, which isn't overtly supernatural but has a sort of weird or fantasy atmosphere. The first story "August Eschenburg" tells of an 18th Century German obsessed with creating mechanical automaton.

I just finished The city and the city by China Mieville, less fantastical as his previous books but I still highly recommend it. A blend of the weird and a police procedural but I think it has more impact the less you know!

I just finished listening to a collection of some of Poe's most famous works. I hadn't read them in some time but found them still very effective. Having creepy stories read out loud is just a bonus.

I've started reading F. Marion Crawford's Wandering Ghosts. I read two of the stories, "The Upper Berth" and "For the Blood Is the Life", in many anthologies but I've never read anything else of his.

I'm currently reading the book The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines--does that qualify as a weird book? It's definitely a slightly different angle of science fiction/fantasy, and I love his take on goblins--at least from what I've read in his Goblin series so far, and in this book, he takes a look at some of the princesses from fairy tales, and of course, the goblins come into play in this book as well.

Message edited by its author, Jul 6, 2009, 8:51am.

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti. The weirdest of the weird tales. Incredible. The Clown Puppet and The Bungalow House being two of the highlights.

Message edited by its author, Jul 10, 2009, 4:49pm.

#43, Totally agree with you on The Bungalow House. Completely brilliant story. For a while there was an audio version available at Thomas Ligotti Online, which I must have listened to dozens of times.

I just finished Conjure Wife from the Fritz Leiber book Dark Ladies. It was really good, very engrossing tale of a college professor who becomes convinced that his wife is practicing witchcraft. He talks her out of it, but that's when things really start to get eerie. Looking forward to Our Lady of Darkness, which is the second park of the book.

I've also been reading some short stories by Gustav Meyrink, author of The Golem. Meyrink was something of an occultist who later became a Buddhist, so there's a bit of the believer in some of the stories, but the couple I've read were quite good.

#14 I enjoyed The Golem it was not at all what I expected though, will have to check out his short stories. Are they similiar at all?

I'm about 100 pages shy of finishing 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. I'm finding a lot of the stories to be fairly formulaic, although there are some dark gems scattered here and there.

Charlie2300 - Clark Ashton Smith is an absolute treasure. Just discovered him last year & couldn't believe I hadn't read him before. Just intoxicating stuff.

You know I have never read any Clark Ashton Smith. I noticed some of his stories on http://www.eldritchdark.com/ so I am going to check them out.

I am stalled reading Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Iain Sinclair.. anybody read it? I am finding it very confusing.

The Eldritch Dark is a great site. Make sure you check out his poetry, too - CAS considered himself to be 1st and foremost a poet, & that was the work that he wanted primarily to be judged by.

Haven't read Sinclair, but I understand his work is somewhat analogous to Alan Moore's, so I imagine it's quite challenging.

I have not read Slow Chocolate Autopsy yet, but several other books by Iain Sinclair, and am quite a fan of his. His books are certainly not for everyone, though - they do demand quite a bit of work on part of the reader (but do reward it richly, I have found) and and anyone reading fiction mostly for the plot is unlikely to be very happy with them.

I think I approached it the wrong way, i.e a novel instead of a loose collection of short stories. However the prose doesn't help sometimes the language soars and I love it and try to work it out but at other times I am just not enjoying enough to wade through. All in all a difficult book!

I had a quick glance at some reviews and they indicate this may not be the best Sinclair has to offer so I will try again.

I've been reading Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings based on a NY Times book review which compared him to Poe and Lovecraft. It actually took me a few stories to get into the feel of Holt's "voice" and get into the stories, but now I'm finding them pretty intriguing. One theme that seems to run through most of them is the nature of words and how they serve as a tool for relating to others, ourselves, the world. At the same time, there seems to be a skepticism of that efficacy of language. If you're into the more cerebral end of the weird and want to check out a new author, I highly recommend it.

#45 - clifsha, I've never read The Golem, so I can't really compare. I picked up Fledermäuse because I had heard enough about Meyrink's Golem to get me interested.

I a;most finish read the Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli

regards wongsableng
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New Troll (as of today). Those are links to his/her blog postings.

#51 sounds intriguing.

Whilst looking for an excerpt (I reckon evry new book should have one!) online I found this (autobiographical?) story of his in Granta: http://www.granta.com/Contributors/Terre...